"Want" | Reflection by Lisa Levy, Outreach Coordinator

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” This is the familiar first line of Psalm 23, a gentle but radical song of intimacy and tenderness between the divine and their beloved. “Want” in this case means “lack”: Because the Lord is my shepherd, the psalmist says, I shall lack for nothing. But what about people who are in a perpetual state of want? 

At Loaves & Fishes, the largest and oldest food pantry in New Haven, we distribute groceries to between 400 and 450 of our neighbors in a two-hour timespan every Saturday morning. We open the doors at 8:30, but dozens of people are already in line when I arrive at 6:45, no matter the weather. Even on the day this past January when it was -6 degrees (with a “feels like” temperature of -22), there were over 100 people waiting. “Want” is, to me, embodied in that line of shivering people, wrapped around the block, waiting for food to bring home to their families. We live in a place of such abundance, but when that abundance is available only to a lucky few, is it really abundance at all? 

In Psalm 23, the psalmist offers a beautiful image of abundance when they write, “my cup overflows,” with goodness, mercy, and divine love. This abundance flows from God—God can pour into our hurt places, our wounded places, our hard-to-reach places, our shame-filled places, our vulnerable places, our places of greatest need—but, I think, it often comes through us. In John 13:34, Jesus tells the disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” It is incumbent upon us to give to one another an abundance of goodness, mercy, and love. This can look like small moments of kindness; it can look like doing the work of being in sustained relationship; and it can also look like concrete actions we can take in service of our neighbors. Today, may we commit to helping alleviate another’s want by overflowing their cup with goodness, mercy, love, and action.

Lisa Levy is the Outreach Coordinator at Trinity Church on the Green and Loaves & Fishes Food Pantry, working at both locations through a creative partnership inspired by our shared goal of caring for our neighbors.